In 1744 the Jesuit priest Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682-1761) wrote the first general history of French settlements in North America. In this monumental work, comprising three volumes, he relied in part on the personal knowledge that he acquired during two visits to New France. From 1705 to 1709, he taught grammar at the Jesuit College in Quebec. From 1720 to 1722, Charlevoix traveled from the St. Lawrence Valley to New Orleans in quest of information on the Western Sea.

The first two volumes form a detailed account of political, military and diplomatic events relating to Acadia, Canada, and Louisiana. The first volume covers the period from the initial discoveries and settlement attempts in the 16th century to the “Iroquois Wars” of the 1680s, while the second volume continues through the years 1680-1731. The third volume contains an account of Charlevoix’s voyage of 1720-22.

Map of Canada, by Guillaume Delisle, reproduced in The History of Minnesota, ed. Edward Duffield Neill. LC General Collections.

As a student astronomer at the Academy of Sciences in 1702 (long before becoming a member of that body as a geographer in 1718), Guillaume Delisle (1675-1726) was well informed on the latest discoveries when in 1703 he drew this remarkably precise map of Canada and the Great Lakes region.

Fort Pontchartrain, located at the straits of Lake Erie and Lake St. Claire, was founded in 1701 by the French officer Lamothe-Cadillac and named in honor of France’s Navy Minister, the comte de Pontchartrain. The megalomaniac visionary Lamothe-Cadillac hoped to make the post “the Paris of New France.” The interior of the fort was arranged according to a grid plan, similar to a small town. During the 18th century, Detroit (which literally means “the strait”) became the principal French settlement in the Great Lakes region. In 1765 the settlement included some 2,600 Indians and 800 persons of European origin, spread out over 15 kilometers on both sides of the Detroit River.

Henri IV, one of the few monarchs interested in maritime expansion and colonies, granted monopolies for the exploitation of Canadian furs, on the condition that grantees found settlements there and ensure their population. The Protestant Pierre Du Gua de Monts, a principal beneficiary of the monopolies in the beginning of the 17th century, went to Acadia in 1604 and the following year founded Port Royal (present-day Annapolis-Royal). In order to control furs coming from the interior, in 1608 he directed Champlain to construct a fortification on the St. Lawrence River, at Quebec. But around 1625 the two settlements still remained simple trading posts. Quebec had only 100 residents. The development of Port-Royal, victim of an English raid in 1613, was subjected to the Franco-British rivalry for control of the region.

Grand Master and General Superintendent of Navigation, Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) wished to accelerate the development of Canada. In 1627 he created the Company of the One Hundred Associates. In return for important privileges,
the Company was responsible for
the peopling of the colony and the conversion of the Indians.

With the temporary conquest of Quebec by English privateers between 1629 and 1632, however, the Company was confronted with terrible difficulties. Immigration remained weak and demographic growth progressed slowly--3,000 residents in 1660 in the St. Lawrence Valley at Quebec, 400 in Acadia, 80 at Newfoundland. In 1642 the Society of Our Lady of Montreal, established for the conversion of the “savages,” founded Ville-Marie (Montreal), which became less a missionary center than a hub for the fur trade.

By 1760, the population of the St. Lawrence Valley had reached 75,000, primarily due to natural increase.

French colonization in the interior of the continent expanded through an ever-widening network of posts and Franco-Indian alliances, but without real settlement. From the beginning of the 1660s, a number of posts, which served as points of military support and above all as trading posts for the fur trade, were founded on the banks of the Great Lakes–or Pays d’en Haut, as the region was called. Traders, soldiers, and missionaries lived in close contact with the Indians. The most important posts were Michilimackinac in the north, and Detroit in the south. The latter post, which was founded in 1701 by Lamothe-Cadillac, a native of southwestern France, had some 800 European residents in 1760.

Acadia, on the other hand, developed slowly. Overtaken by British forces during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), it was definitively ceded by France, along with Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. France nevertheless retained fishing rights in Newfoundland (on the “French Shore”) and took control of two islands located at the entrance to the St. Lawrence gulf: Cape Breton Island, which was renamed Ile Royale, and Ile St. Jean. Both islands had important economic and military roles. With the development of fisheries and the construction in 1720 of the fortress at Louisbourg, considered the linchpin of the St. Lawrence Valley, they were indispensable to France.